Rev. Marjorie Funk-Pihl Assistant to the Bishop for Congregational Mission/Director for Evangelical Mission Thank you for the continued opportunity to serve you as Director for Evangelical Mission. I love this job/call! MISSION to serve: My overall purpose in the synod office is to support the vitality and sustainability of our congregations. I work with congregations in all stages of life from exploring the possibility of starting a congregation to discerning God s will in what might be the last days. Sort of like pastoral ministry only instead of individuals, I work with congregations. FAITH EMBODIED in Our Work: God is up to something. Our job is to figure out how we can join in! HIGHLIGHTS: One of the highlights of my call is to work with our pastors who are developing new congregations. If you want to know what God is up to in our synod, get to know this great group! Each of these communities is evaluated annually, as are the developer pastors. In addition, I meet with each pastor almost monthly and worship with them a couple of times per year. Meet our New Start Congregations! You can read an article and see photos from each of these ministries in your copy of our Southwest California Synod: Stories of Faith in Action which is part of the packet you will receive upon arrival at assembly. During the assembly you will have the opportunity to meet each of these pastors face to face. Look for our Speed Dating sessions and find these developer pastors where you see their names on the top of poles standing about 7 feet from the ground. Adore! is a BRAND new community led by Joseph Castaneda Carrera with a specific outreach to Latino LGBT folks in North Hollywood. They are hosted by St. Matthews in North Hollywood. Another Level is in its 6 th year of existence but its FIRST year as an official congregation under development with a called and ordained pastor: Jonathan Hemphill. Students from several colleges and their families enjoy worship together. They are currently hosted by Ascension Lutheran in Los Angeles. Bloom has just finished its first year as a congregation under development in the Santa Clarita Valley. Ryan Chaddick is the pastor of this homegrown group! They are renting space from St Stephen s Episcopal Church. Glory is in its 7 th year and moving toward fully organizing as a congregation in the next year. This community is made up of local Chinese-Americans and Taiwanese-Americans from the Torrance area, and USC students from mainland China. Pastor Newman Chiu leads this vibrant and excited group!
Iglesia Luterana Santa Cruz: Is in its thirteen year and headed toward organizing as a recognized congregation of the ELCA. This is a community of Oaxacan folks who live in Santa Maria and work in the fields. They speak Mixteco and some Spanish, though the children (and there are A LOT of them) speak English fluently. This year saw the beginning of a major transition with the retirement of their founding pastor Patricia Muran. Interim Pastor Ron Gieko is leading them while we look for a new developer. Mission St. Francis is a BRAND new community that has risen from the ashes of the now closed Holy Shepherd in Chatsworth. This is a synod exploration project to see if a new congregation can thrive in Chatsworth. Our pastoral team is comprised of veteran pastor Sam Platts and able assistant Ramiel Shamwell. Reformation/Reformacion is another of our new congregations under development. Reformation was born from the legacy of Messiah Lutheran in Pasadena and is an intentionally a mulit-cultural and bilingual community. Pastor Jennifer Amos Burgos and evangelist/teem candidate Maria Elena Montalvo lead this community. St Matthew s Filipino Ministry, Glendale. Pastor Marcos Panahon is in his second year as pastor of this community which is an extension of St Matthew s, Glendale. You should hear this group sing in Tagalog! Thai Fellowship of Hollywood is another of our exploration projects. Pastor/developer Pongtep Golf Chutimapongrat comes to us from the Pacifica synod where he pastors a Thai congregation in Whittier. Several folks started commuting from Hollywood/Burbank area to Whittier, so we thought why not have an extension campus in Hollywood and see what grows? They are in their first 6 months!! Another highlight of mine is working with pastors in redevelopment ministry. Currently we have two congregations in that program of the ELCA. These congregations are also evaluated annually and I meet with these pastors most months and worship with these communities a couple of times per year. First Lutheran, Inglewood, suffered a bit in the transition between pastors, but now, with the leadership of Redeveloper Pastor George Villa and a great council, they coming back to life. There are two services every Sunday (English and Spanish) and a lively band leading most Sundays. St Matthew s North Hollywood has called Redeveloper Pastor Stephanie Jaeger to lead them through the ELCA s Transformational Ministry process. They are dedicated to reaching out to their neighborhood in artistic and creative ways. This should be a great thing for the talented folks who call North Hollywood home. FORWARD to Serve God s People in 2016: You may have heard about a project called: ReThink, ReTool, ReNew. Well, we rethought it, retooled it and the renewed version is called: Learning from each other s strengths
Living the Resurrection! Listening Experimenting Sharing Together. You and your congregation have already been invited to become part of this exciting process!! When you arrive (or if you are already here As you arrived) you will receive an official invitation and the directions for how to begin the process. Watch for our presentation during assembly! What Living the Resurrection is: What it is not: Structured learning process Pre-packaged program Biblically grounded...secular Supported by Lutheran Theology From somewhere else Peer to peer...expert driven Workshops...Lectures Experiments Notebooks Flexible...Prescribed By us, for us. Cookie-cutter 18 month process 1 time and gone. Frequently Asked Questions: Why would my congregation want to join this process? Because we can learn from each other! After all, who knows what it s like to be Lutheran in Central and Southern California better than we do! What is the focus of the Living the Resurrection process? When Jesus was asked Which is the greatest commandment? he responded: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27). On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus gave a new commandment: love one another. (John 13:34). These three commandments, to love God, love one another and love neighbor, form the foundational purposes of
the church. Living the Resurrection! will focus on celebrating and nurturing these three relationships. What is a Learning Community? We will create communities where learning from each other happens easily and freely. How will Learning communities be formed? Every congregation in the synod is invited to take the Congregational Vitality and Sustainability Survey in the month of June. Beginning in July we will schedule workshops where each congregation will discover their strengths and growth areas in terms of the three foundational relationships. Each Learning Community will include congregations of complementary strength and growth areas so that, through sharing, we can learn one another. Each invited congregation will create a Resurrection Team of 5-6 people (including the pastor). We will form Learning Communities by joining the Resurrection Teams of 6-8 congregations. We need each Learning Community to be as diverse as possible so that we can hear from folks who are not like us. Each Resurrection Team will be assigned a coach to help them stick to the goals and experiments that they set for themselves. Each Learning Community will have a facilitator as well as guest speakers for topics the community wants to explore. What kind of time commitment will this take? Learning Communities, made up of the Resurrection Teams of different congregations, will work together for 18 months. Workshops will be offered every other month for that time period. Each Resurrection team will develop projects and experiments to work on between workshops. What are the expectations for participating congregations?
Each Learning Community will create a covenant agreement to guide the expectations as they work together for 18 months. The covenant will be voted on and accepted at a specially called meeting of the congregation. Covenants will include the following expectations: Each Resurrection Team will attend all workshops of the Learning Community. Each congregation will pay $1,000. over the course of the 18 months. This will cover the cost of workshop facilitators and coaches for Living the Resurrection. Each Resurrection Team will host one workshop or work with another congregation to help host. Each Resurrection Team will work with their coach. What can we give up to be able to do this? Living the Resurrection will generate energy in your congregation, but it will also require energy. Congregations who accept the invitation to participate will need to decide which of their current activities they will suspend for the next 18 months. There will be suggestions at the opening workshop of sections of the ELCA Constitution for Congregations that can be suspended for this process. How can my congregation sign up? Every congregation of our synod is invited to take the Congregational Vitality and Sustainability Survey in the month of June. At synod assembly each congregation will receive an invitation with the web address you ll need to find the Congregational Vitality and Sustainability Survey. Each congregation has a unique web address so we can keep the survey results separate. You can print out paper copies of the survey or let people take it on their cell phones or ipads. Pass the survey out at the end of worship, play music while people fill it out, then collect them and mail them in! That s all you need to do! You might want to offer it for a couple of Sundays in a row. This is for your worshiping community not people who are associated with your congregation, but don t come to worship.
Can my congregation take the survey, and then decide not to participate in Living the Resurrection? Yes. Taking the survey does not commit your congregation to the process. I have questions. Who can I talk to? During our synod assembly, there will be a table in the vendor room staffed by the team who have been working on Living the Resurrection. Feel free to bring your questions to the table. After assembly, please email Pastor Marj Funk-Pihl at mfunkpihl@socalsynod.org with any questions or concerns.